New York Times debunks U.S. News and Brill's shilling for corrupt Clinton White House:
June 28, 1998
Tripp to Tell Grand Jury of Tape Recordings
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By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
WASHINGTON -- They have heard her voice for months, but on
Tuesday morning, the 23 men and women serving on a federal
grand jury here will finally meet Linda Tripp. As the Pentagon employee
explains why she chose to betray a friend, the grand jurors will have an
opportunity to weigh her motives and credibility by looking in her eyes.
It was Mrs. Tripp's surreptitious taping of Monica Lewinsky's conversations
that began an independent counsel's investigation into President Clinton's
relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, a one-time White House intern. Now, Mrs.
Tripp will tell the grand jury whether she was seeking to protect the truth, as
she has maintained, or hoping to exploit a sensational tale to write a tell-all
book, as her critics have suggested.
Perhaps as much as any single piece of evidence, Mrs. Tripp's story -- and
how the grand jury reacts to it -- could determine the fate of the inquiry by
Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel. Her much-anticipated testimony
comes at a critical moment in the investigation, as Starr's office has been
negotiating with Ms. Lewinsky's new legal team on an immunity deal. If a
deal falls through, Ms. Lewinsky could soon face indictment and Mrs. Tripp
would become the star witness against her.
That would make Mrs. Tripp's credibility and motives particularly important
and sure to come under fierce attack by Ms. Lewinsky's lawyers.
In public statements, Mrs. Tripp has insisted that she recorded some of her
conversations with Ms. Lewinsky to corroborate the truth about her friend's
sexual relationship with the president in case she was called to testify in the
Paula Corbin Jones civil lawsuit against Clinton.
"Linda is ready to tell the truth about the facts as she knows them," said
Anthony Zaccagnini, Mrs. Tripp's lawyer. "She is anxious to get this over and
behind her so that she can move on with her life."
Until now, the grand jurors have formed their impressions of Mrs. Tripp by
listening to excerpts of nearly 20 hours of conversations she secretly
recorded last autumn with Ms. Lewinsky, whom she befriended when the
intern was transferred to the Pentagon from the White House. According to
lawyers familiar with the inquiry, the grand jury has heard Mrs. Tripp urge
Ms. Lewinsky to tell the lawyers in the Jones sexual harassment case the
truth about her relationship with the president.
Unlike the grand jurors, the public has been privy to only a handful of
quotations from about four hours of Mrs. Tripp's tapes, and those tend to
cast her in a negative light. In snippets of their conversations published in two
weekly news magazines, Mrs. Tripp is portrayed as having manipulated Ms.
Lewinsky's behavior.
But the most important tape has not been heard outside the grand jury room,
nor has it been disclosed publicly. That is the recording made by Starr's
prosecutors of Mrs. Tripp's meeting with Ms. Lewinsky on Jan. 13, four
days before Clinton denied under oath in the Jones lawsuit that he had ever
had sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky.
On that two-and-a-half-hour tape, made at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in
Pentagon City, Va., a suburb of Washington, Ms. Lewinsky makes
statements "damaging" to Clinton and his longtime friend, Vernon Jordan,
according to two people who have listened to it.
Over an afternoon snack of tea and cookies, Mrs. Tripp asks Ms. Lewinsky
to describe her conversations with Jordan about finding a job, as well as her
conversations with the president.
In an anguished voice that at times borders on "hysterical," Ms. Lewinsky
herself insists that she feels she must "deny" she had a relationship with
Clinton, and she repeatedly urges Mrs. Tripp to deny any knowledge of it,
too, the two people said. (More than once, Mrs. Tripp refuses to lie about
their relationship and says she plans to tell the truth.)
But at the same time, Ms. Lewinsky says that she would deny her
relationship with Clinton in a signed affidavit in the Jones lawsuit only if she
obtains a lucrative job with the help of Jordan, according to one of the two
people.
The Ritz-Carlton tape was used by Starr's prosecutors to persuade Attorney
General Janet Reno to authorize an expansion of Starr's investigation to
include an inquiry into whether the president committed perjury or obstructed
justice. Since late January, the grand jury here has examined whether Clinton
or anyone else urged Ms. Lewinsky to lie to the Jones lawyers, and whether
efforts to find her a job were meant to insure her silence.
Both Clinton and Jordan have denied that they told Ms. Lewinsky or anyone
else to lie.
In an article this week in U.S. News & World Report, which reviewed two
hours of tapes, Mrs. Tripp comes across as a manipulative, overbearing
woman who tries to guide and shape Ms. Lewinsky's answers through
leading questions.
The magazine said, for example, that Mrs. Tripp "appears to encourage
Lewinsky's obsession" with the president, telling her on the tapes that she
should insist to Betty Currie, the president's secretary, that she must see the
president. And it said that on parts of the tapes, Mrs. Tripp "also seems to
be encouraging Lewinsky to ask the president for a job."
The U.S. News account supports the impression, conveyed in a lengthy
article two weeks ago in Brill's Content, a new magazine on the media, that
publication of the scandal was orchestrated by Mrs. Tripp and Lucianne
Goldberg, a New York literary agent, with the help of Michael Isikoff, a
Newsweek correspondent.
Explaining that Isikoff wanted tangible evidence beyond the tapes to verify a
presidential affair, Ms. Goldberg is quoted in the article as saying: "We told
Linda to suggest that Monica use a courier service to send love letters to the
president. And we told her what courier service to use. Then we told
(Isikoff) to call the service" to ask for receipts.
To Mrs. Tripp's legal team, it is not a coincidence that an unflattering portrait
of Mrs. Tripp emerged not long before her scheduled appearance before the
grand jury. They say they believe it represents an effort by the president's
defenders to malign Mrs. Tripp.
Questions about Mrs. Tripp's motives had been raised before, usually by the
president's defenders. In 1996, they point out, Mrs. Tripp was trying to write
a book about the Clinton scandals with Ms. Goldberg, who has made no
secret of her anti-Clinton bias. Mrs. Tripp's working title for her book was
"Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw at the Clinton White House." Her
working nom de plume was "Joan Dean," after John Dean, the aide in the
Nixon White House.
Although the tapes that have been made public seem to reinforce the
impression that Mrs. Tripp had ulterior motives, people who have heard all
20 hours of the tapes say that this is a misimpression. Like any smattering of
verbal exchanges between two people, the quotes published so far do not
completely reflect the complexity of the women's relationship, they say.
"All of these quotes are taken out of context," said another person who has
heard most of the tapes. "It is impossible to understand their whole
relationship by looking at an hour or two hours of conversations, which
amount to nothing more than 1 percent of all their conversations about the
subject."
The person said, "These women talked about this for hundreds of hours; it's
all they talked about."
Starr has tried to corroborate the details in the tape-recorded conversations
between Mrs. Tripp and Ms. Lewinsky. According to lawyers familiar with
the inquiry, Starr's prosecutors have gone to great lengths to confirm almost
everything said on the tapes, including going to court to fight for the right to
subpoena records of Ms. Lewinsky's book purchases. On tape, Ms.
Lewinsky talks about buying books for Clinton, including "Vox," a novel by
Nicholson Baker about phone sex.
Since her name has become a household word, Mrs. Tripp has stayed
mostly out of the public eye. She has spent many hours preparing for her
grand jury appearance, which had originally been scheduled for the first
week of June, but was called off at the last minute after Ms. Lewinsky
dismissed her original lawyer, William Ginsburg, and hired the Washington
lawyers Plato Cacheris and Jacob Stein.
Mrs. Tripp released just one public statement, in late January, when she
insisted that she made the recordings to protect her reputation after Robert
Bennett, the president's personal lawyer, declared last summer, "Linda Tripp
should not be believed." In an August 1997 issue of Newsweek, Mrs. Tripp
had described seeing a White House volunteer, Kathleen Willey, leave the
Oval Office after Ms. Willey claimed she had fended off an unwanted sexual
advance by the president.
It was Bennett's challenge to her credibility that inspired Mrs. Tripp to make
the tape recordings of her talks with Ms. Lewinsky, an account she is
prepared to tell the grand jury on Tuesday morning, her friends say. To her,
the grand jury appearance, expected to last three days, represents the
opportunity to set the record straight.
"I think there have been unfair characterizations," one friend said this week
about the most recent tape recordings made public. "We always anticipated
that the White House spin would be a 40-some-year-old woman has
exercised too much control over a 24-year-old girl."
nytimes.com
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